Fun Friday Links: One Futurologist on Innovation, Your Email is Not a To-Do List, and Jafflechutes

Welcome to Conspire’s Super Happy Fun Friday Link Time, a weekly collection of cool discoveries from around the Web. Most times the goal is to get you thinking differently about communication, collaboration, culture, and life in general. Other times, LOLCAT ATTACK! Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.

A Futurologist Examines the Idea and Process of ‘True Innovation’

We spend quite a bit of time examining the nuts and bolts of innovation around here, so our collective antennae always twitch when a thought leader in the field starts making projections about where the industry is headed. In this piece, futurologist Magnus Lindkvist discusses how businesses will only be truly innovative by ignoring what the market wants and instead, driving disruptive thinking. From Information Age:

“…when asked how a company gets trend-setting itself and becomes innovative, I start with a simple question; do you want to compete or create?

Creating can be alienating. People are often scared to take a chance and most tend to be disparaging of new ideas. If you look at most successful entrepreneurs and inventors now, we say in hindsight that they had good ideas. But just consider the journey they went on to get to that point. New ideas are often unnerving and there’s no doubt that all your entrepreneurial heroes will have had their share of critics.

Having studied trends for many years I liken the process of innovation to using a ketchup bottle. You squeeze and squeeze, and nothing happens – but then soon you have ketchup all over the place. All it takes is one good idea or product and then suddenly you have similar creations almost everywhere.”

Stop Using Your Inbox as a To-Do List

Ah, yes — most of us are certainly guilty of using our Inbox’s “Unread” feature to save to-dos for later, and most of us also know how stressful and ineffective that can be (not to mention easy to ignore and easy to mess up). In this article, HBR’s Alexandra Samuel explains why a separate-but-equal approach to emails and tasks is the best solution for managing what needs to get done. From HBR:

“If you’re conflating email and task management, then the job of simply communicating–reading and replying to your messages–gets bogged down by all the emails you leave sitting in your inbox simply so you won’t forget to address them. (And there are probably a few to-do reminders in there that you sent to yourself!) This approach also makes managing your to-do-list problematic: when you need to quickly identify the right task to take on next, nothing slows you down like diving into your inbox to scroll through old messages.

The reason so many of us fall into the trap of conflating email and task management is that email is inextricable from much of what we do in work and in life: many of our tasks arrive in the form of email messages, and many other tasks require reading or sending emails as part of getting that work done.”

What On Earth is a Jafflechute?

Deviating from this week’s more cerebral pieces, we bring you Australia’s latest — and quite innovative — solution to food delivery: meal by parachute, or the Jafflechute if you’re down under. In a nutshell, Paypal and this “float-down eatery” have partnered up to make it (almost) literally rain meatballs. Or rather, sandwiches, which is what the current menu seems to be made up of. This irreverent exchange goes into the details, and you can watch the video below to see the Jafflechutes in action.